INVISIBLE WOMAN
COLD GALICJA
There are two kinds of Christmas disasters. The first involves a woman who has no chair at a Spanish Navy lunch. The second involves a woman who has acquired a permanent place in a Spanish naval officer’s apartment, only to discover that the officer himself is no longer entirely certain he wants her there.
I had survived the first disaster on 14 December 2024. I was about to discover the second.
In the two weeks between the Spanish Christmas lunch and our departure for Kraków on 28 December, something changed in Laureano. At first, I could not identify it. He became quieter. His appetite disappeared. He lost weight with alarming speed, something I would later recognise as a feature of his periods of emotional distress. His stomach began troubling him. He withdrew into himself, and the man who had once filled a room with his presence seemed increasingly unable to occupy even the space immediately around him.
I was too happy to understand what was happening.
We were going to Poland for New Year. Not just the two of us, but a family expedition: Laureano, his son Javier, his daughter, my daughter and me. I had organised the trip with the enthusiasm of a woman preparing to introduce the man she loved to a part of herself that he had not yet encountered.
He had already met my daughter. That was not the novelty. The novelty was Poland.
Laureano knew me as a British woman, a lawyer, a person with a complicated collection of languages and national histories. Now I wanted to show him the country in which I had spent fourteen formative years, the place where I had become an adult.
I was a Warsaw girl. Kraków was not Warsaw, of course, but I knew it well. During my years in Poland I had visited frequently, and I carried the city inside me as a collection of streets, memories and stories.
There was also a linguistic joke that delighted me. Kraków belonged to the historical region of Galicja, pronounced almost exactly like Spanish Galicia. I was taking my hot Canarian to the cold Galicja. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it turned out.
The first warning came in the form of my belongings.
I had been moving my possessions from my house into Laureano’s apartment. It was a large apartment, with plenty of room for two people, but even the largest home can look temporarily overwhelmed when someone arrives with the contents of another life.
There were bags, boxes, clothes, books and miscellaneous objects everywhere. It was not a permanent condition. It was what happens when a person moves house.
I looked at the piles and saw a day’s work.
Laureano looked at them and apparently saw the end of civilisation.
I watched his expression change. Something close to horror appeared in his eyes. He became very quiet, retreated to the fireplace and settled himself on the floor beside it, almost motionless.
He stopped talking to me.
I asked what was wrong.
Eventually, he admitted that the sight of my possessions had frightened him. Until that moment, he said, he had not fully understood that I was there permanently.
This surprised me. I had thought that was rather the point of moving in together.
But I was not inclined to turn a domestic inconvenience into a philosophical crisis. I had boxes to unpack.
Over the course of the day, I put things into cupboards, drawers and wardrobes. The piles disappeared. The apartment returned to its previous appearance, except that my possessions were now discreetly integrated into it.
I went back to the fireplace.
“Look,” I said. “You can’t even see my things anymore. Everything is in the cupboards. Problem solved.”
He looked at me sadly.
“Yes,” he said. “Your problem is solved.”
It was an extraordinary answer to what I considered a successful domestic operation.
I asked why he was still so unhappy.
Then another story emerged.
His wife had taken the children to Spain for a week. They were staying in a house in El Puerto de Santa María, where, according to Laureano, the heating was not working properly. It was December, the house was cold, and she had been sending him messages describing how the children were suffering.
He showed me the messages. They were in Spanish, which I could not yet read well enough to follow the exchange independently, so I relied on his explanation.
According to him, she had been complaining for several days. The children were cold. They were sleeping in their outdoor clothes. They were becoming unwell. He was being told that the situation was his responsibility because they were his children.
I listened.
“Does she have a car?”
“Yes.”
“Are there shops nearby?”
“Yes.”
“Does she have money?”
“Yes.”
“Then why doesn’t she go and buy an electric heater?”
He looked miserable.
I tried again.
“Two heaters. Three heaters. Four heaters, if necessary. They are not particularly expensive. If the house is cold and the children are suffering, why are we still discussing this?”
He explained that he had already suggested buying heaters, but she had refused and continued arguing with him.
I found this incomprehensible.
Perhaps I was being excessively practical. But when I encounter a cold room, I look for a source of heat. I do not normally regard the absence of central heating as an invitation to conduct a three-day international correspondence about responsibility.
“Can you arrange delivery?” I asked. “Surely someone in Spain can bring a heater to the house.”
He said he would deal with it.
He disappeared for about an hour. When he returned, he told me he had persuaded his wife to buy a heater. She had done so, and the house was now warm.
“Wonderful,” I said.
As far as I was concerned, the matter was closed.
I had solved my problem by putting my clothes in the wardrobes. He had solved the heating problem by persuading someone to purchase an electrical appliance. We had achieved two practical victories in a single day.
Yet Laureano remained deeply unhappy.
At the time, I did not understand why. I could see his distress, but I could not distinguish how much of it came from his separation, how much from concern for his children, how much from our developing relationship, and how much from circumstances I knew nothing about.
I was still learning the difference between solving a problem and relieving the emotional burden attached to it.
Not everything during those two weeks was difficult.
On Christmas Eve, 24 December, we celebrated Nochebuena in our own way. Laureano and I went to the fish market and bought seafood: fish, prawns and an assortment of marisco. We bought an enormous lobster, called him Vassilis (no idea why that Greek name) and placed him in a large plastic tub, where he was supposed to await our Nochebuena celebrations.
Unfortunately, he did not survive until Christmas Eve and ended up being boiled ahead of schedule.
It was Christmas I organised as what I promised to do to Delgado, when we talked about the Christmas food at the MARCOM event two weeks earlier. We prepared a Christmas meal in the Andalusian tradition.
I loved the whole business of it.
There was something wonderfully theatrical about a table laden with seafood — the delicate colours of the shells, the gleaming lobster, the abundance of prawns, all arranged on exquisite limited-edition porcelain designed by Valentin Yudashkin for the Imperial Porcelain Factory, which I brought many years ago from Saint-Peterburg. The refinement of Russian craftsmanship met the exuberance of an Andalusian Christmas table. It was an unlikely but beautiful marriage of cultures, and for that evening, at least, they belonged together.
And unlike the Spanish Navy Christmas lunch, this time I did not need an admiral to provide me with a chair.
There were only three of us. We had bought the food ourselves, cooked it ourselves and sat down together without consulting a seating plan.
For a few hours, Spain existed in our home as something warm and generous.
I wanted to believe that this was what our life would be like.
I had reason to believe it could work. Earlier in December, before the Spanish Christmas lunch, we had organised a birthday celebration for Laureano's son at our apartment. Both his children had come, along with my daughter. We had spent an enjoyable evening together. The children had relaxed. We had laughed and talked. We played board games. There had been none of the strained silence that would later become so noticeable.
I remembered that evening because it gave me a point of comparison.
Before the Spanish Christmas lunch, our attempts at becoming a blended family had seemed natural enough. I had even taken on the rather formidable task of helping Laureano’s son apply to one of the UK's leading universities.
It was not an easy undertaking, and the difficulties came from both directions. The university struggled to understand his immigration status as the son of a serving Spanish NATO officer. What should have been a relatively straightforward admissions process required extensive legal analysis, detailed explanations and considerable correspondence before the institution could properly understand his circumstances. On the other side, Javier was initially reluctant to accept my help, or even to explore his university options seriously. But gradually his resistance gave way to curiosity, and curiosity to genuine enthusiasm. I was delighted. I thought I was helping a young man discover possibilities for his future.
There is an old Russian saying: «Не делай добра — не получишь зла» — roughly, No good deed goes unpunished.
Nine months later, that university application would return to our lives in circumstances I could never have imagined. What I had regarded as a small triumph of persistence, legal reasoning and family cooperation would become entangled in the crisis that culminated in Laureano's suicide attempt. Somehow, even my efforts to help his son would become part of the story of what had gone wrong.
I had helped a young man secure an opportunity for his future. I could not yet imagine how that achievement would later be turned into something for which I was made to feel responsible.
Anyway, coming back to the period after the Spanish dinner - something appeared to shift.
I did not know what had changed, or why.
I only knew that the children seemed less comfortable, and that Laureano was becoming increasingly troubled.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder what those children were experiencing. Their father had a new partner, and that partner was a Russian-born woman who, as I would later discover, had become the subject of deeply unpleasant remarks within parts of the Spanish military community.
How does a child navigate such an atmosphere?
What happens when adults attach insulting labels to someone who is becoming part of their father's life?
And what might the children have been hearing at home?
I have to be careful here. I do not know what they were told, by whom, or how often. In fact, I now suspect that the Gorrión Rojo — Red Sparrow — nickname may have circulated within a relatively restricted circle of officers rather than throughout the wider Spanish community. Neither Laureano nor I became aware of that particular label until September 2026. It is therefore entirely possible that his children had never heard it.
The cruder description — “fucking Russian spy” — was another matter entirely. I have no doubt that the children heard it. Their mother repeatedly shouted those words about me, and I am certain they were exposed to them. They were being asked to navigate an already difficult family situation while hearing their father's new partner described in the most degrading terms.
Whatever their personal feelings towards me, they were children caught in an adult conflict they had not created.
And perhaps that is what troubles me most in retrospect. Children do not need to understand military politics, security clearances or institutional rivalries to sense that the adults around them disapprove of someone. They notice silences, changes of tone and the tension that enters a room when a particular name is mentioned.
But I can say that, before the Spanish Christmas lunch, we had been able to laugh together. Afterwards, something felt different.
And I had no idea what conversations, if any, had taken place beyond my hearing.
Then, on Friday 27 December, the day before our flight, another crisis arrived.
Laureano told me that his wife had slipped, fallen and injured her head near her eyebrow. There was concern about whether she could safely remain at home without the children. The children, understandably worried about their mother, no longer wanted to travel.
Laureano spent much of the day negotiating.
I did not participate in those conversations. I knew what he told me, and I could see what the situation was doing to him.
My daughter, meanwhile, arrived with her suitcase, ready for the holiday. She stayed overnight. From her side, everything was straightforward.
On Saturday morning we collected Laureano’s children.
They were visibly upset. Eye contact was scarce. Conversation was minimal.
Nevertheless, they got into the car, and we set off for the airport.
Our flight was delayed by seven hours because of heavy snow affecting Kraków.
Seven hours in an airport is enough time to reconsider almost any life decision, including the wisdom of taking three children and a distressed Spanish naval officer to Poland in the middle of winter.
But eventually we boarded.
We were going to Kraków.
My Kraków.
The city of kings, churches, cobbled streets, Jewish history, student memories and bitterly cold winter evenings.
I had imagined myself introducing Laureano to its beauty, its food, its history and its particular sense of time. I wanted him to see the Poland I knew, not the Poland reduced to stereotypes in foreign conversations.
What I had not anticipated was that he would spend so much of the holiday somewhere else.
Not physically. He was beside us.
But his attention was repeatedly drawn back to England.
He was constantly looking at his telephone.
I asked what was happening.
He was worried about his wife, he said. She had injured her head and was having difficulty obtaining medical assistance. He told me that her limited English made communicating with doctors difficult.
I could understand concern about a head injury. That was not trivial, and I did not regard it as trivial.
What puzzled me was the apparent absence of any practical support around her.
We knew a Spanish military community existed in Britain. We had just attended one of its Christmas gatherings. There were Spanish families, colleagues and acquaintances. Surely, I thought, someone could help her communicate with a doctor, arrange transport or deal with whatever practical assistance she needed.
Perhaps there were complications I did not know about. Perhaps people had already tried to help. I had no direct access to her circumstances, and I was hearing only Laureano’s account.
But from where I stood, the situation seemed to be consuming him.
He was receiving messages, answering messages, worrying about messages. His children were also in contact with their mother. I could see the effect of the continuing uncertainty, although I could not know precisely what was being said.
It felt as though our holiday had acquired an invisible sixth traveller.
And that traveller was receiving most of Laureano’s attention.
Still, Kraków was beautiful.
The city had not lost its ability to surprise me. Winter made it severe and magnificent. The daylight was brief, the air cold enough to hurt, and the streets carried that particular Central European mixture of history and endurance.
We visited Wawel, the royal castle overlooking the Vistula. We walked through the old streets and explored Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter.
There were good moments. Real ones.
The children became interested in what they were seeing. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes the tensions that had accompanied us from England seemed to loosen.
I enjoyed showing them the city.
I knew where we were going. I knew what the buildings meant to me. I knew which streets held memories from my student years.
For once, I was not the foreign woman trying to decode somebody else’s social rules.
I was at home in my own history.
One day, I insisted that Laureano come out for a walk around noon. He had been complaining about feeling depressed, about his inability to pull himself together, and about the lack of sunlight.
The days were among the shortest of the year. The sky seemed to offer very little light, and the cold discouraged any unnecessary excursion.
I was not going to allow him to spend the entire holiday indoors.
We went walking.
I tried to bring him back into the present: to the streets, the buildings, the people, the city around us.
He came with me, but I could see how much effort even ordinary enjoyment seemed to require.
His responses were sometimes distracted. His face had lost its usual animation. He rarely smiled. He complained of feeling depressed, and I believed him. Whatever was happening inside him, it was not something he could simply switch off because we were on holiday.
I did not know how to help beyond the things I could actually do.
So I walked with him.
And somewhere in Kazimierz, among the streets of Kraków’s Jewish quarter, I told him a story from my youth.
It was a story I had almost forgotten.
It was also, in retrospect, one of the more absurd coincidences in a life that would later become crowded with allegations about intelligence services.
In approximately 1992 or 1993, I was a young journalism student at the University of Warsaw.
I had arrived in Poland from St Petersburg in 1991. The country was undergoing a dramatic transformation, and so was I.
Poland in those years was not an easy place in which to begin a new life. The economic reforms associated with Leszek Balcerowicz had transformed the country with extraordinary speed.
Opportunities appeared, old certainties disappeared, and ordinary people struggled to understand the new rules.
I was trying to find my place.
I had become involved with a group of young conservatives, or something close to that description. Through them, I was offered the opportunity to help organise a visit by a group from an Israeli university, somewhere in Tel Aviv.
The arrangement was attractive: I could travel to Kraków without paying for the trip, provided I helped with the organisation.
At that stage, I had never visited Kraków.
Naturally, I agreed.
The visiting group consisted of roughly twenty students and two female lecturers. Among the Polish organisers, my English was probably one of the strongest, so I found myself acting as a translator and general intermediary.
The two lecturers invited me to share their room.
The Israeli delegation was composed predominantly of women, although I can no longer remember whether there were any men among the students. Many of them had already completed military service. They were young, educated, articulate, and carried experiences that were quite different from my own.
We talked constantly. About history, politics, Russia, Poland, Israel, and the peculiar business of belonging to a country.
One of the excursions on our programme was a visit to Auschwitz.
For reasons I can no longer reconstruct, our group divided. Most of the students travelled to Auschwitz with another Polish organiser. I remained in Kraków with the two lecturers.
Both women had lost relatives in the Holocaust, including family members murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, as I understood it, the visit had particular personal significance for many members of the delegation, whose families had suffered there.
I knew the history of Auschwitz well, or at least I believed I did.
I had grown up in the Soviet Union, where the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops formed part of the historical narrative of the Second World War. I had watched documentaries and films about the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Later, in Poland, I had studied the history again and Holocaust formed a significant part of it.
I knew what had happened.
What I could not understand was how it had been possible.
That afternoon, we talked about the Holocaust.
"How could people do that?" I asked. "How could they simply destroy other human beings?"
She looked at me thoughtfully.
"Because to them," she said, "Jews were like lice."
Then she took my hand.
"Imagine," she continued, indicating my skin, "that there is a louse sitting here. What would you do?"
I looked at my hand.
"You would crush it," she said. "Instinctively. You would not think twice. That was how they saw us."
I considered this.
"But wait," I said. "What if the louse looked at me and started speaking? What if it said something intelligent? Something rational?"
She watched me.
"Then I wouldn't crush it," I continued. "I would be fascinated. I would want to understand how a louse could speak. I would want to study it."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she slowly shook her head.
I remember that gesture remarkably clearly.
At the time, I did not understand it.
I thought we were discussing the psychology of killing, the limits of instinct, perhaps even the philosophical distinction between human beings and other living creatures.
I was approaching the question as a young student who believed that curiosity and reason were fundamental human responses to the unfamiliar.
If something unexpected happened, surely the natural reaction was to investigate it.
If a creature you considered insignificant suddenly demonstrated intelligence, surely that would force you to reconsider your assumptions.
It seemed perfectly obvious to me.
Apparently, it was not obvious to her.
Shortly afterwards, the conversation took an unexpected turn.
She began asking more questions about me. My education, my languages, my Russian and Polish background, my life in Poland, and what I intended to do with my future.
Then she told me about her connections with Israeli intelligence and suggested that I consider moving to Israel.
With my background, she said, I could have excellent prospects in the security services. She would be willing to recommend me.
I was flattered, surprised, and completely uninterested in emigrating again.
I had only recently left Russia. Poland was still new to me. I was studying journalism, making friends, learning to belong somewhere. The economic upheaval of the early 1990s was difficult enough without voluntarily starting another life in another country.
I thanked her and declined.
For years, that was how I remembered the encounter: an unusual conversation with an Israeli lecturer, followed by an unexpected suggestion that I might have a future in intelligence.
I remembered her taking my hand.
I remembered the imaginary louse.
I remembered her shaking her head.
But I did not understand what she had been trying to explain.
Not really.
Thirty years later, I think I finally do.
She was explaining dehumanisation.
She was not talking about insects. She was describing the psychological process through which one group of human beings comes to perceive another as something less than human — something whose suffering no longer demands recognition, whose voice no longer requires attention, whose destruction can be made to seem ordinary.
And I, in my youthful innocence, had completely missed the point.
I had imagined that the louse could save itself by speaking.
That intelligence, rationality, communication — some recognisable demonstration of consciousness — would interrupt the impulse to crush it.
What I had failed to understand was that dehumanisation does not necessarily depend on the victim's inability to speak.
It depends on the perpetrator's refusal to recognise the speaker as human.
The words may be perfectly rational. The evidence may be clear. The person may explain, reason, protest, ask questions, and demonstrate every quality we ordinarily associate with humanity.
None of it necessarily matters once the decision has been made that this particular person does not deserve to be heard.
I would not compare my own experiences with the Holocaust. The historical scale, purpose and consequences are incomparably different.
But the underlying concept of dehumanisation, which had once been so alien to my understanding of human behaviour, would eventually become painfully recognisable to me in a much smaller and very different setting.
I would encounter people who seemed able to discuss me as a label rather than a person.
People for whom word Russian could become a substitute for character, spy a substitute for evidence, and suspicion a substitute for the ordinary obligation to listen.
And I would spend an extraordinary amount of time doing precisely what I had imagined that intelligent louse might do.
Speaking.
Explaining.
Presenting evidence.
Trying to make people curious enough to reconsider what they thought they knew.
Only then did I begin to understand why the lecturer had shaken her head.
She had understood something about human beings that I had not.
The tragedy is not that the louse cannot speak. It is that sometimes nobody wants to hear it.
I remember asking the professor why she thought that I am Jewish as she seemed convinced that I had Jewish ancestry.
“You look Jewish,” she told me, referring particularly to my large eyes.
I found the whole conversation fascinating and rather strange.
There was some Jewish ancestry on my father’s side, although I did not personally know any Jewish relatives. Much later, a commercial DNA test would suggest a modest component of Jewish ancestry. But at the time, my family history was not something I had explored in any systematic way.
What mattered to the lecturer was apparently the possibility that I might be interested in a new country and a new career.
I was not.
I had only recently moved from Russia to Poland. That transition had been difficult enough. I was beginning to establish friendships, education, routines and a sense of belonging.
Poland was becoming my country.
The idea of abandoning everything and beginning again in Israel was overwhelming.
I declined.
So here it was - a real approach by an agent to recruit me to become an operative for a foreign intelligence. My official confession.
There was no dramatic confrontation. No secret handshake. No envelope containing instructions. No cinematic recruitment ceremony.
A woman had suggested a possible future. I had decided that I wanted a different one.
Whether she was genuinely connected to an intelligence service, and whether her proposal amounted to anything more formal than an exploratory conversation, I never established.
I went back to my studies.
Life continued.
And thirty years later, I was walking through Kraków with a Spanish naval officer, telling him that, once upon a time, someone who claimed an intelligence connection had suggested I might make a useful operative.
Laureano was not remotely surprised.
In fact, he seemed to consider the proposition perfectly reasonable.
He told me that I would have been excellent at intelligence work.
Had I accepted, he joked, I would probably have become the head of Mossad by now.
I laughed.
It was a generous assessment of a career I had never pursued.
I had spent decades doing other things: studying, working, building a professional life, raising my daughter, moving between languages and legal systems. The possibility of becoming an intelligence operative had never been a serious part of my plans.
But I enjoyed the joke.
I also enjoyed the fact that Laureano did not find the story alarming. To him, my languages, curiosity, education and ability to navigate unfamiliar environments seemed entirely compatible with the qualities he associated with intelligence work.
There was no accusation in his reaction.
Only admiration, delivered by a man who was himself too unhappy to take much pleasure in the conversation.
I could not have known then how differently such a story might sound when retold in another context.
I was not thinking about national security. I was thinking about the strange paths that a life can take, and about the extraordinary fact that I was back in Kraków, three decades older, walking beside a man I loved.
The city had brought two versions of myself together.
The young woman who had refused to leave Poland for an uncertain future in Israel.
And the middle-aged woman who had fallen in love with a Spanish officer and believed she was finally building a shared future.
I wondered what the younger woman would have made of me.
Probably she would have been impressed by the languages and the legal qualifications.
She might have been less impressed by my inability to understand what was happening in my own relationship.
Another day, we visited the salt mines at Wieliczka.
It was one of the highlights of the holiday.
The descent into the earth was extraordinary. We walked through underground passages into a world of salt, carved chambers, timber structures and astonishing spaces created by generations of miners.
The children were delighted.
For a while, the tension seemed to disappear. There was so much to look at, so much to discover, that even the worries travelling with us from England appeared to lose their hold.
I was relieved to see them enjoying themselves.
Laureano, however, was struggling.
I remember looking at his face and being shocked by how unwell he appeared. His eyes seemed sunken. His expression was exhausted. He told me that he felt terrible and that being underground, without sunlight, made him feel worse.
We were surrounded by one of Poland’s most remarkable attractions, and he seemed almost unable to experience it.
I worried about him.
I had seen him lose weight. I had watched his appetite disappear. I had listened to him describe his depression. Now, underground, I could see the physical toll that the preceding weeks appeared to have taken.
I could not tell whether the immediate problem was exhaustion, anxiety, the environment or something else.
I only knew that the man beside me was suffering.
And I did not know how to reach him.
The holiday continued with its mixture of pleasures and difficulties.
There were excursions, meals and moments of ordinary family enjoyment. The children could be cheerful and interested. They were not constantly hostile, nor were they directing their frustration at my daughter or me.
What I increasingly noticed was a challenging edge in their exchanges with their father.
Sometimes I heard defiance in their voices. Laureano seemed particularly distressed by it.
I tried to smooth things over where I could, without making myself the centre of a family situation I did not fully understand.
His daughter also became unwell after spending time insufficiently dressed for the Polish winter. Her cold became a practical concern. We were abroad, the weather was severe, and the last thing any of us needed was a sick child.
I found myself doing what I usually did when circumstances became complicated.
I looked for solutions.
I tried to keep people comfortable, fed, occupied and reasonably happy.
But the more I tried to manage the practical difficulties, the more obvious it became that the central problem was not practical.
Laureano was profoundly unhappy.
And his unhappiness was beginning to define the atmosphere around us.
I did not know whether our relationship itself was the cause, one cause among several, or simply the place where other pressures were becoming visible.
I knew only that I had arrived in Kraków full of anticipation, and that the man with whom I had hoped to share the city seemed increasingly absent from it.
Yet I do not want to remember that holiday only through his distress.
That would be unfair to the city, to the children, and to the moments we genuinely enjoyed.
We saw beautiful places. We explored. We laughed occasionally. We had the sort of experiences that families remember years later, even when the adults were privately struggling.
And we spent New Year’s Eve in Kraków’s Old Town, among the crowds gathered around the historic market square.
The Rynek Główny was alive with people welcoming the new year.
I loved being there.
There was something comforting about standing in a familiar Polish square, surrounded by the noise and movement of celebration, with the people I had brought together for this holiday.
I wanted to believe that the difficulties of December belonged to the old year.
A new year was beginning.
Perhaps Laureano would recover his spirits. Perhaps the children would settle into the new arrangement. Perhaps the complicated business of blending two families, two histories and several cultures would become easier with time.
I had no expectation that it would be effortless.
I was simply prepared to work at it.
On 2 January 2025, the day after New Year’s Day, we flew back to London.
We had survived the delayed flight, the Polish winter, the family tensions, the illness, the underground excursion and the strange emotional weather that had accompanied us throughout the holiday.
I was tired, but I was still hopeful.
I thought we were returning home to resume the life we had begun building together.
Instead, almost immediately, a pipe burst in Laureano’s apartment.
The heating stopped working.
And that was how the new year began.
With a broken pipe, a cold apartment, and a man who had already spent weeks telling me that he could not cope.
I had no idea how much more was about to break.
And today's song - Under Winter Lights
I had survived the first disaster on 14 December 2024. I was about to discover the second.
In the two weeks between the Spanish Christmas lunch and our departure for Kraków on 28 December, something changed in Laureano. At first, I could not identify it. He became quieter. His appetite disappeared. He lost weight with alarming speed, something I would later recognise as a feature of his periods of emotional distress. His stomach began troubling him. He withdrew into himself, and the man who had once filled a room with his presence seemed increasingly unable to occupy even the space immediately around him.
I was too happy to understand what was happening.
We were going to Poland for New Year. Not just the two of us, but a family expedition: Laureano, his son Javier, his daughter, my daughter and me. I had organised the trip with the enthusiasm of a woman preparing to introduce the man she loved to a part of herself that he had not yet encountered.
He had already met my daughter. That was not the novelty. The novelty was Poland.
Laureano knew me as a British woman, a lawyer, a person with a complicated collection of languages and national histories. Now I wanted to show him the country in which I had spent fourteen formative years, the place where I had become an adult.
I was a Warsaw girl. Kraków was not Warsaw, of course, but I knew it well. During my years in Poland I had visited frequently, and I carried the city inside me as a collection of streets, memories and stories.
There was also a linguistic joke that delighted me. Kraków belonged to the historical region of Galicja, pronounced almost exactly like Spanish Galicia. I was taking my hot Canarian to the cold Galicja. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it turned out.
The first warning came in the form of my belongings.
I had been moving my possessions from my house into Laureano’s apartment. It was a large apartment, with plenty of room for two people, but even the largest home can look temporarily overwhelmed when someone arrives with the contents of another life.
There were bags, boxes, clothes, books and miscellaneous objects everywhere. It was not a permanent condition. It was what happens when a person moves house.
I looked at the piles and saw a day’s work.
Laureano looked at them and apparently saw the end of civilisation.
I watched his expression change. Something close to horror appeared in his eyes. He became very quiet, retreated to the fireplace and settled himself on the floor beside it, almost motionless.
He stopped talking to me.
I asked what was wrong.
Eventually, he admitted that the sight of my possessions had frightened him. Until that moment, he said, he had not fully understood that I was there permanently.
This surprised me. I had thought that was rather the point of moving in together.
But I was not inclined to turn a domestic inconvenience into a philosophical crisis. I had boxes to unpack.
Over the course of the day, I put things into cupboards, drawers and wardrobes. The piles disappeared. The apartment returned to its previous appearance, except that my possessions were now discreetly integrated into it.
I went back to the fireplace.
“Look,” I said. “You can’t even see my things anymore. Everything is in the cupboards. Problem solved.”
He looked at me sadly.
“Yes,” he said. “Your problem is solved.”
It was an extraordinary answer to what I considered a successful domestic operation.
I asked why he was still so unhappy.
Then another story emerged.
His wife had taken the children to Spain for a week. They were staying in a house in El Puerto de Santa María, where, according to Laureano, the heating was not working properly. It was December, the house was cold, and she had been sending him messages describing how the children were suffering.
He showed me the messages. They were in Spanish, which I could not yet read well enough to follow the exchange independently, so I relied on his explanation.
According to him, she had been complaining for several days. The children were cold. They were sleeping in their outdoor clothes. They were becoming unwell. He was being told that the situation was his responsibility because they were his children.
I listened.
“Does she have a car?”
“Yes.”
“Are there shops nearby?”
“Yes.”
“Does she have money?”
“Yes.”
“Then why doesn’t she go and buy an electric heater?”
He looked miserable.
I tried again.
“Two heaters. Three heaters. Four heaters, if necessary. They are not particularly expensive. If the house is cold and the children are suffering, why are we still discussing this?”
He explained that he had already suggested buying heaters, but she had refused and continued arguing with him.
I found this incomprehensible.
Perhaps I was being excessively practical. But when I encounter a cold room, I look for a source of heat. I do not normally regard the absence of central heating as an invitation to conduct a three-day international correspondence about responsibility.
“Can you arrange delivery?” I asked. “Surely someone in Spain can bring a heater to the house.”
He said he would deal with it.
He disappeared for about an hour. When he returned, he told me he had persuaded his wife to buy a heater. She had done so, and the house was now warm.
“Wonderful,” I said.
As far as I was concerned, the matter was closed.
I had solved my problem by putting my clothes in the wardrobes. He had solved the heating problem by persuading someone to purchase an electrical appliance. We had achieved two practical victories in a single day.
Yet Laureano remained deeply unhappy.
At the time, I did not understand why. I could see his distress, but I could not distinguish how much of it came from his separation, how much from concern for his children, how much from our developing relationship, and how much from circumstances I knew nothing about.
I was still learning the difference between solving a problem and relieving the emotional burden attached to it.
Not everything during those two weeks was difficult.
On Christmas Eve, 24 December, we celebrated Nochebuena in our own way. Laureano and I went to the fish market and bought seafood: fish, prawns and an assortment of marisco. We bought an enormous lobster, called him Vassilis (no idea why that Greek name) and placed him in a large plastic tub, where he was supposed to await our Nochebuena celebrations.
Unfortunately, he did not survive until Christmas Eve and ended up being boiled ahead of schedule.
It was Christmas I organised as what I promised to do to Delgado, when we talked about the Christmas food at the MARCOM event two weeks earlier. We prepared a Christmas meal in the Andalusian tradition.
I loved the whole business of it.
There was something wonderfully theatrical about a table laden with seafood — the delicate colours of the shells, the gleaming lobster, the abundance of prawns, all arranged on exquisite limited-edition porcelain designed by Valentin Yudashkin for the Imperial Porcelain Factory, which I brought many years ago from Saint-Peterburg. The refinement of Russian craftsmanship met the exuberance of an Andalusian Christmas table. It was an unlikely but beautiful marriage of cultures, and for that evening, at least, they belonged together.
And unlike the Spanish Navy Christmas lunch, this time I did not need an admiral to provide me with a chair.
There were only three of us. We had bought the food ourselves, cooked it ourselves and sat down together without consulting a seating plan.
For a few hours, Spain existed in our home as something warm and generous.
I wanted to believe that this was what our life would be like.
I had reason to believe it could work. Earlier in December, before the Spanish Christmas lunch, we had organised a birthday celebration for Laureano's son at our apartment. Both his children had come, along with my daughter. We had spent an enjoyable evening together. The children had relaxed. We had laughed and talked. We played board games. There had been none of the strained silence that would later become so noticeable.
I remembered that evening because it gave me a point of comparison.
Before the Spanish Christmas lunch, our attempts at becoming a blended family had seemed natural enough. I had even taken on the rather formidable task of helping Laureano’s son apply to one of the UK's leading universities.
It was not an easy undertaking, and the difficulties came from both directions. The university struggled to understand his immigration status as the son of a serving Spanish NATO officer. What should have been a relatively straightforward admissions process required extensive legal analysis, detailed explanations and considerable correspondence before the institution could properly understand his circumstances. On the other side, Javier was initially reluctant to accept my help, or even to explore his university options seriously. But gradually his resistance gave way to curiosity, and curiosity to genuine enthusiasm. I was delighted. I thought I was helping a young man discover possibilities for his future.
There is an old Russian saying: «Не делай добра — не получишь зла» — roughly, No good deed goes unpunished.
Nine months later, that university application would return to our lives in circumstances I could never have imagined. What I had regarded as a small triumph of persistence, legal reasoning and family cooperation would become entangled in the crisis that culminated in Laureano's suicide attempt. Somehow, even my efforts to help his son would become part of the story of what had gone wrong.
I had helped a young man secure an opportunity for his future. I could not yet imagine how that achievement would later be turned into something for which I was made to feel responsible.
Anyway, coming back to the period after the Spanish dinner - something appeared to shift.
I did not know what had changed, or why.
I only knew that the children seemed less comfortable, and that Laureano was becoming increasingly troubled.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder what those children were experiencing. Their father had a new partner, and that partner was a Russian-born woman who, as I would later discover, had become the subject of deeply unpleasant remarks within parts of the Spanish military community.
How does a child navigate such an atmosphere?
What happens when adults attach insulting labels to someone who is becoming part of their father's life?
And what might the children have been hearing at home?
I have to be careful here. I do not know what they were told, by whom, or how often. In fact, I now suspect that the Gorrión Rojo — Red Sparrow — nickname may have circulated within a relatively restricted circle of officers rather than throughout the wider Spanish community. Neither Laureano nor I became aware of that particular label until September 2026. It is therefore entirely possible that his children had never heard it.
The cruder description — “fucking Russian spy” — was another matter entirely. I have no doubt that the children heard it. Their mother repeatedly shouted those words about me, and I am certain they were exposed to them. They were being asked to navigate an already difficult family situation while hearing their father's new partner described in the most degrading terms.
Whatever their personal feelings towards me, they were children caught in an adult conflict they had not created.
And perhaps that is what troubles me most in retrospect. Children do not need to understand military politics, security clearances or institutional rivalries to sense that the adults around them disapprove of someone. They notice silences, changes of tone and the tension that enters a room when a particular name is mentioned.
But I can say that, before the Spanish Christmas lunch, we had been able to laugh together. Afterwards, something felt different.
And I had no idea what conversations, if any, had taken place beyond my hearing.
Then, on Friday 27 December, the day before our flight, another crisis arrived.
Laureano told me that his wife had slipped, fallen and injured her head near her eyebrow. There was concern about whether she could safely remain at home without the children. The children, understandably worried about their mother, no longer wanted to travel.
Laureano spent much of the day negotiating.
I did not participate in those conversations. I knew what he told me, and I could see what the situation was doing to him.
My daughter, meanwhile, arrived with her suitcase, ready for the holiday. She stayed overnight. From her side, everything was straightforward.
On Saturday morning we collected Laureano’s children.
They were visibly upset. Eye contact was scarce. Conversation was minimal.
Nevertheless, they got into the car, and we set off for the airport.
Our flight was delayed by seven hours because of heavy snow affecting Kraków.
Seven hours in an airport is enough time to reconsider almost any life decision, including the wisdom of taking three children and a distressed Spanish naval officer to Poland in the middle of winter.
But eventually we boarded.
We were going to Kraków.
My Kraków.
The city of kings, churches, cobbled streets, Jewish history, student memories and bitterly cold winter evenings.
I had imagined myself introducing Laureano to its beauty, its food, its history and its particular sense of time. I wanted him to see the Poland I knew, not the Poland reduced to stereotypes in foreign conversations.
What I had not anticipated was that he would spend so much of the holiday somewhere else.
Not physically. He was beside us.
But his attention was repeatedly drawn back to England.
He was constantly looking at his telephone.
I asked what was happening.
He was worried about his wife, he said. She had injured her head and was having difficulty obtaining medical assistance. He told me that her limited English made communicating with doctors difficult.
I could understand concern about a head injury. That was not trivial, and I did not regard it as trivial.
What puzzled me was the apparent absence of any practical support around her.
We knew a Spanish military community existed in Britain. We had just attended one of its Christmas gatherings. There were Spanish families, colleagues and acquaintances. Surely, I thought, someone could help her communicate with a doctor, arrange transport or deal with whatever practical assistance she needed.
Perhaps there were complications I did not know about. Perhaps people had already tried to help. I had no direct access to her circumstances, and I was hearing only Laureano’s account.
But from where I stood, the situation seemed to be consuming him.
He was receiving messages, answering messages, worrying about messages. His children were also in contact with their mother. I could see the effect of the continuing uncertainty, although I could not know precisely what was being said.
It felt as though our holiday had acquired an invisible sixth traveller.
And that traveller was receiving most of Laureano’s attention.
Still, Kraków was beautiful.
The city had not lost its ability to surprise me. Winter made it severe and magnificent. The daylight was brief, the air cold enough to hurt, and the streets carried that particular Central European mixture of history and endurance.
We visited Wawel, the royal castle overlooking the Vistula. We walked through the old streets and explored Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter.
There were good moments. Real ones.
The children became interested in what they were seeing. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes the tensions that had accompanied us from England seemed to loosen.
I enjoyed showing them the city.
I knew where we were going. I knew what the buildings meant to me. I knew which streets held memories from my student years.
For once, I was not the foreign woman trying to decode somebody else’s social rules.
I was at home in my own history.
One day, I insisted that Laureano come out for a walk around noon. He had been complaining about feeling depressed, about his inability to pull himself together, and about the lack of sunlight.
The days were among the shortest of the year. The sky seemed to offer very little light, and the cold discouraged any unnecessary excursion.
I was not going to allow him to spend the entire holiday indoors.
We went walking.
I tried to bring him back into the present: to the streets, the buildings, the people, the city around us.
He came with me, but I could see how much effort even ordinary enjoyment seemed to require.
His responses were sometimes distracted. His face had lost its usual animation. He rarely smiled. He complained of feeling depressed, and I believed him. Whatever was happening inside him, it was not something he could simply switch off because we were on holiday.
I did not know how to help beyond the things I could actually do.
So I walked with him.
And somewhere in Kazimierz, among the streets of Kraków’s Jewish quarter, I told him a story from my youth.
It was a story I had almost forgotten.
It was also, in retrospect, one of the more absurd coincidences in a life that would later become crowded with allegations about intelligence services.
In approximately 1992 or 1993, I was a young journalism student at the University of Warsaw.
I had arrived in Poland from St Petersburg in 1991. The country was undergoing a dramatic transformation, and so was I.
Poland in those years was not an easy place in which to begin a new life. The economic reforms associated with Leszek Balcerowicz had transformed the country with extraordinary speed.
Opportunities appeared, old certainties disappeared, and ordinary people struggled to understand the new rules.
I was trying to find my place.
I had become involved with a group of young conservatives, or something close to that description. Through them, I was offered the opportunity to help organise a visit by a group from an Israeli university, somewhere in Tel Aviv.
The arrangement was attractive: I could travel to Kraków without paying for the trip, provided I helped with the organisation.
At that stage, I had never visited Kraków.
Naturally, I agreed.
The visiting group consisted of roughly twenty students and two female lecturers. Among the Polish organisers, my English was probably one of the strongest, so I found myself acting as a translator and general intermediary.
The two lecturers invited me to share their room.
The Israeli delegation was composed predominantly of women, although I can no longer remember whether there were any men among the students. Many of them had already completed military service. They were young, educated, articulate, and carried experiences that were quite different from my own.
We talked constantly. About history, politics, Russia, Poland, Israel, and the peculiar business of belonging to a country.
One of the excursions on our programme was a visit to Auschwitz.
For reasons I can no longer reconstruct, our group divided. Most of the students travelled to Auschwitz with another Polish organiser. I remained in Kraków with the two lecturers.
Both women had lost relatives in the Holocaust, including family members murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, as I understood it, the visit had particular personal significance for many members of the delegation, whose families had suffered there.
I knew the history of Auschwitz well, or at least I believed I did.
I had grown up in the Soviet Union, where the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops formed part of the historical narrative of the Second World War. I had watched documentaries and films about the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Later, in Poland, I had studied the history again and Holocaust formed a significant part of it.
I knew what had happened.
What I could not understand was how it had been possible.
That afternoon, we talked about the Holocaust.
"How could people do that?" I asked. "How could they simply destroy other human beings?"
She looked at me thoughtfully.
"Because to them," she said, "Jews were like lice."
Then she took my hand.
"Imagine," she continued, indicating my skin, "that there is a louse sitting here. What would you do?"
I looked at my hand.
"You would crush it," she said. "Instinctively. You would not think twice. That was how they saw us."
I considered this.
"But wait," I said. "What if the louse looked at me and started speaking? What if it said something intelligent? Something rational?"
She watched me.
"Then I wouldn't crush it," I continued. "I would be fascinated. I would want to understand how a louse could speak. I would want to study it."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she slowly shook her head.
I remember that gesture remarkably clearly.
At the time, I did not understand it.
I thought we were discussing the psychology of killing, the limits of instinct, perhaps even the philosophical distinction between human beings and other living creatures.
I was approaching the question as a young student who believed that curiosity and reason were fundamental human responses to the unfamiliar.
If something unexpected happened, surely the natural reaction was to investigate it.
If a creature you considered insignificant suddenly demonstrated intelligence, surely that would force you to reconsider your assumptions.
It seemed perfectly obvious to me.
Apparently, it was not obvious to her.
Shortly afterwards, the conversation took an unexpected turn.
She began asking more questions about me. My education, my languages, my Russian and Polish background, my life in Poland, and what I intended to do with my future.
Then she told me about her connections with Israeli intelligence and suggested that I consider moving to Israel.
With my background, she said, I could have excellent prospects in the security services. She would be willing to recommend me.
I was flattered, surprised, and completely uninterested in emigrating again.
I had only recently left Russia. Poland was still new to me. I was studying journalism, making friends, learning to belong somewhere. The economic upheaval of the early 1990s was difficult enough without voluntarily starting another life in another country.
I thanked her and declined.
For years, that was how I remembered the encounter: an unusual conversation with an Israeli lecturer, followed by an unexpected suggestion that I might have a future in intelligence.
I remembered her taking my hand.
I remembered the imaginary louse.
I remembered her shaking her head.
But I did not understand what she had been trying to explain.
Not really.
Thirty years later, I think I finally do.
She was explaining dehumanisation.
She was not talking about insects. She was describing the psychological process through which one group of human beings comes to perceive another as something less than human — something whose suffering no longer demands recognition, whose voice no longer requires attention, whose destruction can be made to seem ordinary.
And I, in my youthful innocence, had completely missed the point.
I had imagined that the louse could save itself by speaking.
That intelligence, rationality, communication — some recognisable demonstration of consciousness — would interrupt the impulse to crush it.
What I had failed to understand was that dehumanisation does not necessarily depend on the victim's inability to speak.
It depends on the perpetrator's refusal to recognise the speaker as human.
The words may be perfectly rational. The evidence may be clear. The person may explain, reason, protest, ask questions, and demonstrate every quality we ordinarily associate with humanity.
None of it necessarily matters once the decision has been made that this particular person does not deserve to be heard.
I would not compare my own experiences with the Holocaust. The historical scale, purpose and consequences are incomparably different.
But the underlying concept of dehumanisation, which had once been so alien to my understanding of human behaviour, would eventually become painfully recognisable to me in a much smaller and very different setting.
I would encounter people who seemed able to discuss me as a label rather than a person.
People for whom word Russian could become a substitute for character, spy a substitute for evidence, and suspicion a substitute for the ordinary obligation to listen.
And I would spend an extraordinary amount of time doing precisely what I had imagined that intelligent louse might do.
Speaking.
Explaining.
Presenting evidence.
Trying to make people curious enough to reconsider what they thought they knew.
Only then did I begin to understand why the lecturer had shaken her head.
She had understood something about human beings that I had not.
The tragedy is not that the louse cannot speak. It is that sometimes nobody wants to hear it.
I remember asking the professor why she thought that I am Jewish as she seemed convinced that I had Jewish ancestry.
“You look Jewish,” she told me, referring particularly to my large eyes.
I found the whole conversation fascinating and rather strange.
There was some Jewish ancestry on my father’s side, although I did not personally know any Jewish relatives. Much later, a commercial DNA test would suggest a modest component of Jewish ancestry. But at the time, my family history was not something I had explored in any systematic way.
What mattered to the lecturer was apparently the possibility that I might be interested in a new country and a new career.
I was not.
I had only recently moved from Russia to Poland. That transition had been difficult enough. I was beginning to establish friendships, education, routines and a sense of belonging.
Poland was becoming my country.
The idea of abandoning everything and beginning again in Israel was overwhelming.
I declined.
So here it was - a real approach by an agent to recruit me to become an operative for a foreign intelligence. My official confession.
There was no dramatic confrontation. No secret handshake. No envelope containing instructions. No cinematic recruitment ceremony.
A woman had suggested a possible future. I had decided that I wanted a different one.
Whether she was genuinely connected to an intelligence service, and whether her proposal amounted to anything more formal than an exploratory conversation, I never established.
I went back to my studies.
Life continued.
And thirty years later, I was walking through Kraków with a Spanish naval officer, telling him that, once upon a time, someone who claimed an intelligence connection had suggested I might make a useful operative.
Laureano was not remotely surprised.
In fact, he seemed to consider the proposition perfectly reasonable.
He told me that I would have been excellent at intelligence work.
Had I accepted, he joked, I would probably have become the head of Mossad by now.
I laughed.
It was a generous assessment of a career I had never pursued.
I had spent decades doing other things: studying, working, building a professional life, raising my daughter, moving between languages and legal systems. The possibility of becoming an intelligence operative had never been a serious part of my plans.
But I enjoyed the joke.
I also enjoyed the fact that Laureano did not find the story alarming. To him, my languages, curiosity, education and ability to navigate unfamiliar environments seemed entirely compatible with the qualities he associated with intelligence work.
There was no accusation in his reaction.
Only admiration, delivered by a man who was himself too unhappy to take much pleasure in the conversation.
I could not have known then how differently such a story might sound when retold in another context.
I was not thinking about national security. I was thinking about the strange paths that a life can take, and about the extraordinary fact that I was back in Kraków, three decades older, walking beside a man I loved.
The city had brought two versions of myself together.
The young woman who had refused to leave Poland for an uncertain future in Israel.
And the middle-aged woman who had fallen in love with a Spanish officer and believed she was finally building a shared future.
I wondered what the younger woman would have made of me.
Probably she would have been impressed by the languages and the legal qualifications.
She might have been less impressed by my inability to understand what was happening in my own relationship.
Another day, we visited the salt mines at Wieliczka.
It was one of the highlights of the holiday.
The descent into the earth was extraordinary. We walked through underground passages into a world of salt, carved chambers, timber structures and astonishing spaces created by generations of miners.
The children were delighted.
For a while, the tension seemed to disappear. There was so much to look at, so much to discover, that even the worries travelling with us from England appeared to lose their hold.
I was relieved to see them enjoying themselves.
Laureano, however, was struggling.
I remember looking at his face and being shocked by how unwell he appeared. His eyes seemed sunken. His expression was exhausted. He told me that he felt terrible and that being underground, without sunlight, made him feel worse.
We were surrounded by one of Poland’s most remarkable attractions, and he seemed almost unable to experience it.
I worried about him.
I had seen him lose weight. I had watched his appetite disappear. I had listened to him describe his depression. Now, underground, I could see the physical toll that the preceding weeks appeared to have taken.
I could not tell whether the immediate problem was exhaustion, anxiety, the environment or something else.
I only knew that the man beside me was suffering.
And I did not know how to reach him.
The holiday continued with its mixture of pleasures and difficulties.
There were excursions, meals and moments of ordinary family enjoyment. The children could be cheerful and interested. They were not constantly hostile, nor were they directing their frustration at my daughter or me.
What I increasingly noticed was a challenging edge in their exchanges with their father.
Sometimes I heard defiance in their voices. Laureano seemed particularly distressed by it.
I tried to smooth things over where I could, without making myself the centre of a family situation I did not fully understand.
His daughter also became unwell after spending time insufficiently dressed for the Polish winter. Her cold became a practical concern. We were abroad, the weather was severe, and the last thing any of us needed was a sick child.
I found myself doing what I usually did when circumstances became complicated.
I looked for solutions.
I tried to keep people comfortable, fed, occupied and reasonably happy.
But the more I tried to manage the practical difficulties, the more obvious it became that the central problem was not practical.
Laureano was profoundly unhappy.
And his unhappiness was beginning to define the atmosphere around us.
I did not know whether our relationship itself was the cause, one cause among several, or simply the place where other pressures were becoming visible.
I knew only that I had arrived in Kraków full of anticipation, and that the man with whom I had hoped to share the city seemed increasingly absent from it.
Yet I do not want to remember that holiday only through his distress.
That would be unfair to the city, to the children, and to the moments we genuinely enjoyed.
We saw beautiful places. We explored. We laughed occasionally. We had the sort of experiences that families remember years later, even when the adults were privately struggling.
And we spent New Year’s Eve in Kraków’s Old Town, among the crowds gathered around the historic market square.
The Rynek Główny was alive with people welcoming the new year.
I loved being there.
There was something comforting about standing in a familiar Polish square, surrounded by the noise and movement of celebration, with the people I had brought together for this holiday.
I wanted to believe that the difficulties of December belonged to the old year.
A new year was beginning.
Perhaps Laureano would recover his spirits. Perhaps the children would settle into the new arrangement. Perhaps the complicated business of blending two families, two histories and several cultures would become easier with time.
I had no expectation that it would be effortless.
I was simply prepared to work at it.
On 2 January 2025, the day after New Year’s Day, we flew back to London.
We had survived the delayed flight, the Polish winter, the family tensions, the illness, the underground excursion and the strange emotional weather that had accompanied us throughout the holiday.
I was tired, but I was still hopeful.
I thought we were returning home to resume the life we had begun building together.
Instead, almost immediately, a pipe burst in Laureano’s apartment.
The heating stopped working.
And that was how the new year began.
With a broken pipe, a cold apartment, and a man who had already spent weeks telling me that he could not cope.
I had no idea how much more was about to break.
And today's song - Under Winter Lights
